My curiosity is if the US has just traded off having better passenger rail for better freight rail, and if that's maybe a somewhat environmentally justified choice. How much more freight is going by truck in Europe because of the bias towards rail for passengers, and how does that compare to US people traveling by car when train would be better?
https://www.trucking.org/economics-and-industry-data
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1068592/eu-road-freight-...
Measured by ton-kilometers, the EU moves about 5% of freight by rail, whereas the US moves about 28% of freight by rail.
For rail alone it looks like 50/50. 50% is resources and dry goods, oil and gas, and the rest is consumer goods, boxcar, flatcar, intermodal. [1]
Really it is a (maybe unintentional) decision not to use trains for passenger rail.
On the other hand. The density of population (and thereby logistic) centers in Western and Central Europe makes freight trains much less useful. From Germany you can reach all of Europe in basically 2 days. And that’s already stretching what you’ll need to reach in practice. And then you add the expense of getting the load to a train station and away from it again and you basically never end up with an easy or obvious advantage for the rail system. What you see here quite often is that a single company/factory fills up a whole train (think car carrier or chemical transport). In these cases at least one end of the journey is typically directly linked to the rail system and the other end is probably a port. And that’s before you take into account that a useful expansion of the rail system requires coordination between multiple governments (there was/is a plan to link Rotterdam to Venice by high volume train connections. AFAIK this is still limited by a lack of expansion of a short part in northern Germany)
So yes. There is a bias towards passenger rail, both for operational (passenger rail is much faster to accelerate/decelerate) and political (passengers sometimes punish politicians for delays, freight doesn’t) reasons. But even without that. The geography and industrial makeup doesn’t produce the same kind of advantages as in the US. So it would still be used less
Europe moved lots of freight by rail. But building of motorways shifted a lot of freight to roads. If your company moves just a few trucks of goods per week across Europe, road will be faster and cheaper.
Rail is now used mostly for bulk goods, but increasing conterisation is enabling easier use of rail even for smaller shipments (less than a full train length, which in Europe is max 700 m).
Europe does have more favourable rivers, so some bulk goods (grain, coal, fuel, chemicals) are transported by barge. Other freight can go by sea.
